Is Edward Snowden Going To Work For Russia's Mark Zuckerberg?

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden will begin work at a large
Russian website next month, according to reports in the Russian
press.

"He will provide support for a large Russian site," Snowden's
lawyer Anatoly Kucherena reportedly told Ria Novosti,
refusing to name the site "for security reasons." A separate
report in the Moscow News
says Kucherena claimed Snowden would help maintain "Russia’s
largest site."

Given these descriptions, the speculation in the Russian tech
world is that Snowden has been offered a job at one of Russia's
three Web giants — Yandex, a
search giant with a popular home page (somewhat like Yahoo),
Mail.Ru, one of the country's
largest communications platforms, and VK or VKontakte, a Facebook-like
social network.

One seems more likely than the others. According to Russian
tech site Digit.Ru, Yandex and Mail.ru representatives have
categorically denied that they employ Snowden. On the other hand,
VK's representatives are being a little coy:

"I can not comment on this information," the spokesman
"VKontakte" George Lobushkin told Digit.ru. "The first I have
heard of it. If so, I have not yet reported," the technical
director of VKontakte, Nikolay Durov, said.

In August, Durov wrote a post asking
Snowden to join VK. "We invite Edward to St. Petersburg and
will be happy if he decides to take a position with the stellar
team of programmers at VKontakte," Durov wrote. "In the end,
there is no more popular European Internet company than
VK. I think Edward might be interested in the protection of
personal data for millions of our people."

So, in some ways, a Snowden job at VK might make sense.

In other ways, it seems like a strange choice. Durov's leadership
of VK has recently been fraught with difficulties, and he's
clashed many times with the Russian government — there were
theories earlier this year that Durov was being targeted by the
Kremlin through criminal courts in a bid
for a Putin-backed businessman to gain control of the social
network. If Snowden really is taking a real job with VK, it
raises a lot of questions about his life in Russia.